This disclosure relates to controlling power consumption in systems and, in particular, controlling power consumption in storage systems.
Power consumption of devices is becoming a metric for commercial and consumer markets. For example, in a commercial data center, cooling costs can take up to one third of the total cost. In addition, modern data center servers have begun to adopt high performance solid state drives (SSD), such as NVM Express (NVMe) devices. NVMe devices commonly include higher-performance CPUs and large dynamic random access memories (DRAM) to provide higher performance compared to other SSDs. Such high-performance devices can consume more power, which may become a significant amount of power consumption even in a data center configuration. Similarly, consumer mobile devices, such as laptops, have begun to adopt higher performance SSDs. Power consumption similarly becomes a factor when the mobile device is unplugged.
SSDs may include a maximum thermal design power (TDP). However, the TDP is a specification for maximum power consumption that is set during design to prevent damage to the device. If TDP is exceeded, performance is throttled to remain under the TDP.